The Milagro Beanfield War Read Online Free PDF Page B

yet irrigating that field was an act as irrevocable as Hitler’s invasion of Poland, Castro’s voyage on the Granma, or the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, because it was certain to catalyze tensions which had been building for years, certain to precipitate a war.
    And like any war, this one also had roots that traveled deeply into the past.
    For several hundred years, and until quite recently, Milagro had been a sheep town. Nearly all the fathers of Joe Mondragón’s generation had been sheepmen. There was no man, however, and there had been no men for more than a hundred years, perhaps, who had truly made a living off sheep, the basic reason for this being that Milagro was a company town, and almost every herder, simply in order to survive as a sheepman, had been connected to the Ladd Devine Sheep Company. And being a sheepman connected to the Devine Company was like trying to raise mutton in a tank full of sharks, barracudas, and piranha fish.
    For this, the people of the Miracle Valley had the U.S. Government to thank. Because almost from the moment it was drawn up and signed in 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which not only ended the war between the United States and Mexico, but also supposedly guaranteed to the Spanish-surnamed southwestern peoples their communal grazing lands, was repeatedly broken. Shortly after the war, in fact, the U.S. Congress effectively outlawed their communal property, passing vast acreages into the public domain, tracts which then suddenly wound up in the hands of large American ranching enterprises like the Devine Company. Later, during Teddy Roosevelt’s era, much remaining communal territory was designated National Forest in which a rancher could only run his animals providing he had the money and political pull to obtain grazing permits.
    Hence, soon after the 1848 war, most local ranchers found themselves up to their elbows in sheep with no place to graze them. In due course the small operators were wiped out either from lack of access to grazing land or from trying to compete with the large companies that now dominated the public domain and Forest Service preserves. The sheepmen who survived did so only by becoming indentured servants to the large companies that controlled the range and the grazing permit system.
    In Milagro, this meant that since the last quarter of the nineteenth century most sheep ranchers had been serfs of the Devine Company, which, during the seventies and eighties, in one of those democratic and manifestly destined sleights of Horatio Alger’s hand (involving a genteel and self-righteous sort of grand larceny, bribery, nepotism, murder, mayhem, and general all-around and all-American nefarious skulduggery), had managed to own outright, or secure the grazing rights to, all the property on the Jorge Sandoval Land Grant in Chamisa County.
    At the end of each year since this takeover, every sheepman, woman, and child in Milagro had discovered themselves heavily in debt to the Devine Company. In fact, after an average of ten years under the sheep company’s tutelage, just about every man, including men like Joe Mondragón’s father, Esequiel, had owed the rest of whatever resources he might accumulate in his lifetime to whichever Ladd Devine happened to be sitting on the family nest egg at that particular moment.
    Of course, the Ladd Devine Company had not only been interested in land and sheep and its company (now Nick Rael’s) store. It owned controlling interests in both the First National Bank of Chamisaville and its Doña Luz branch. The Dancing Trout Dude Ranch and Health Spa had been operating on the Devine estate up in Milagro Canyon ever since the early twenties. When the Pilar Café was constructed across from the company store in 1949, it was a Devine operation. And when, more recently, the Enchanted Land Motel was built on the north–south highway to handle the new breed of pudgy tourists who simpered by